Do you remember when movies went away during COVID?

That was kind of a bummer.

I like going to movies sometimes.

We were

watching Onward at the Riverton, Wyoming downtown theater there, and we came out, and there

were news stories. It was like, there's apocalypse. There's no more movies. All the movies are

canceled. And everything shut down for a few months. I started to kind of miss movies. And when

the movie theaters reopened, they all started running these

pre-roll, very dramatic ads before you would watch the actual movies. So you'd get all the trailers,

and then you'd think, oh, it's movie time. No. First, you're going to watch Nicole Kidman walk

through a rainy parking lot into a Cineplex and get some snacks that she would

never consume in real life. And then she's going to deliver this ridiculously dramatic,

self-important monologue straight to camera about the silver screen and how we see the best of

ourselves in film and how humanity once groveled in boredom, clawing out to the gods,

begging for deliverance, and the gods gave us cinema.

It's not exactly what she said, but it was, I mean, it was very self-important,

and then that would get over with, and you'd watch Madam Webb or Morbius or

Moonfall or whatever movie came out during that era. And this really hasn't gone away. You go to the

movie theater, you get self-aggrandizing movie theater stuff. You watch the Academy Awards. It's,

oh, the importance of film. It's all so self-congratulatory. And likewise, I think that's also kind of the tone of maybe the most

famous beloved philosophy book of the pre-Jesus world, that being Plato's Republic. That's the

one everybody's heard of. It's the one that unfortunately we all encounter at like age 18 or 19. Then you power through

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